Review - Translucid by Zen DiPietro

Emé Fallon wakes up the infirmary of Dragonfire Station after a minor shuttle accident. Her injuries were mostly minor, except for a head injury that seems to have robbed her of some of her memories. She remembers how to do her job as security chief but she doesn't remember anything about her past, her coworkers, or even her wife of six months. As she returns to work and tries to relearn her past, she begins to feel that things don't add up. Fallon begins to question who she really is and who she can trust.

I decided to read “Translucid” without much research based on a few strong reviews from trusted sources. So, some of the plot was a bit of a surprise, yet the book definitely lives up to the raves. The story is a delicious combination of Star Trek space opera with a heavy dose of Mission Impossible suspense. It doesn't spend much time world-building. For any science fiction fan, the world will be familiar enough for you to understand it while getting to know the characters, who really drive the story. One of the main reasons I, and one assumes many other reviewers, like this story is that it sucks you in right away, without the usual long preamble of other stories in the genre.

The characters are quite well drawn and believable within the realm of the story. Fallon's injury is not without precedence, but it does make it a little hard to fully put yourself in her shoes. This is probably why the story spends a lot of time telling us what she is thinking and feeling. This “telling” rather than “showing” type of narrative is often frowned upon, but in this case it works without being too distracting.

The other characters around Fallon, even relatively minor ones, are quite three dimensional. While the story focuses on Fallon, there is a quite an ensemble around her, about whom we will probably get to know more in the next book of the series.

You will almost certainly want to plan on reading the next book if you enjoy this one. The ending of this first story fortunately isn't a cliffhanger, but it definitely sets things up for the next book, leaving most of the questions about who Fallon really is and how she ended up on Dragonfire unanswered.

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